Materials by design: An experimental and computational investigation on the microanatomy arrangement of porous metallic glasses

Abstract

The correlation of a material’s structure with its properties is one of the important unresolved issues in materials science research. This paper discusses a novel experimental and computational approach by which the influence of the pores on the mechanical properties of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) can be systematically and quantitatively analyzed. The experimental stage involves the fabrication of a template whose pore configurations are pre-determined by computer-aided design tools, and replication of the designed patterns with BMGs. Quasi-static mechanical characterization of these complex microstructures is conducted under uniaxial tension and in-plane compression. For the numerical simulations, a non-local gradient-enhanced continuum mechanical model is established, using thermodynamic principles and periodic boundary conditions. The combination of the experimental and numerical results has identified the importance of the pore configuration, overall porosity and diameter to the spacing ratio of the pores to attain optimized material properties.